Petty Theft on the Coast Starlight
by Quartertofive
Summary: Sheldon and Amy take the train home, but a criminal is afoot on the #11 Amtrak service to Union Station. Sheldon does love trains, but it never quite occurred to him what forty hours in a very small space with another person could actually entail.
1. Chapter 1

"Sheldon, please," Amy begged. Her rolling suitcase click-clacked over the pavement as she tried to catch up with him. The sleet was going down the back of her neck. "Think about this." She nearly ran into him when he turned a corner and stopped dead.

"Just look at it," Sheldon breathed. Eyes shining, hands clasped to his chest, he was like a child beholding a much-wanted toy on Christmas morning.

"Sheldon, it's a train station," Amy snapped. Her nose had gone from cold to numb, and her hands hurt. It was half past four in the morning, and the storm was picking up.

"Yes. A really _good_ one," he said.

Amy sighed and looked at it. She supposed Vancouver's Pacific Central was reasonably impressive, as that sort of thing went. The brightly lit facade was block wide, with a grand entrance rising the full height of the building. A celebration of technology from a more confident, optimistic age. An age that regarded taking a mere fourty hours to go between Vancouver and Los Angeles as a revolutionary breakthrough.

"Even if we have to wait until tommorow for our flight, we will still get home before the train," Amy said.

"What if the storm lasts for days? What if it destroys the airport? What if this is the global climate change tipping point, and the world is plunged into years of rain, flood and famine?" Sheldon asked. "I'm not staying in Canada for that." He started across the street towards the station.

_Turn around and walk away. _The option presented itself, clear and tempting. She could go back to the hotel, take a hot shower and crawl back into bed. Then spend a day schmoozing and gossiping in the lobby with everyone else stuck in Vancouver after the conference until the storm cleared enough to allow her flight. She could be having dinner with Penny and Bernadette tonight, in Pasadena, and Sheldon would still be rattling his way through Oregon somewhere, probably counting trees.

He glanced back over her shoulder, waiting for her, standing in the middle of the empty, pre-dawn street. _Why do I do this?_ Amy wondered, and followed her boyfriend to Pacific Central.

#

"The engine is a Genesis P42DC." Sheldon was almost skipping along the platform. The train stretched out beside them, amazingly long, made up of solid two-deck carriages. Warm, inviting light glowed through it's myriad windows. "It has a maximum speed of 110 mph."

There was a certain granduer to the moment, Amy had to admit. A vast clockface ticked away the time in solemn Roman numerals. Flurries of snow became briefly visible as they danced into the circles of light cast by the platform lamps. Beneath them, people were reduced to small, huddled figures, swathed in coats, scarves and hats, warm breaths wafting white. Their hugs and kisses and goodbyes had become fragile, brave things, lost in the vastness of the storm and the station.

Sheldon was still talking. "...built in 1919. The first Seattle-Los Angeles route didn't start until 1971, after the formation of Amtrak. At first it was called the Coast Daylight, but then it was amalgamated with the Oakland-San Diego route-"

"This is it," Amy stopped Sheldon from walking right past their carriage.

He took a sharp turn and climbed aboard with hardly a break to the rhythm. "-and the new line kept the name." He gestured her down the cramped corridor. "Welcome to the Coast Starlight."

"The what?" Amy hauled her luggage along, checking the numbers above the doors, looking for their cabin. Was it called a cabin, on a train? She found the right door and edged inside. The space was shaped like three phonebooths stuck together, and mostly occupied by two beds that folded out from the wall, one above the other. There was just barely room to stand with her suitcase. When Sheldon joined her and slid the door shut behind him, there was barely room to breathe.

"The train is called the Coast Starlight," he said again.

Amy smiled. "That is so romantic."

Sheldon frowned down at her. "No it isn't."

"Yes it is."

"No."

"Yes."

"It's a _train_."

"Yes," Amy grinned. "A _romantic_ train."

Sheldon scowled for an instant, and then it was gone. "Dibs top bunk."

"All yours," she said, but it turned out to be easier said than done.

To get to the ladder, Sheldon had to get past her. Amy tried half a shuffled step back, Sheldon tried to slip past her and then they were somehow trapped against one another, sandwiched in the tiny space.

"Um."

"Er."

Sheldon put his hands on her shoulders, trying to turn them both and switch places. The train lurched into motion and threw her fully against his chest, his arms reflexively going around her.

A whistle blew, sharp and bright, and it seemed to infect Sheldon like a disease. His arms tightened around Amy, enough to make breathing a suddenly complex matter. His smile was beatific. "We're underway!"

Amy patted his back. "Yes, we are."

The rhytmic beat of the railway, steel wheels against steel rails, was building up in her ears. A slow, solemn old heartbeat that grew younger and fiercer with every second as the train picked up speed.

Forty hours to Los Angeles, was it?


	2. Chapter 2

Sheldon stretched out on the bunk. "Nope."

"What?" Amy asked from the bottom bed, where she was rifling through her suitcase.

"Let's switch."

"I thought you wanted the top bunk."

"So did I, but I see now it's going to play havoc with my inner ear. It's a very delicate structure."

"Fine," she sighed.

Sheldon sat up, hit his head on the ceiling, and climbed down the rickety stepladder to the floor. _Oh no, not again. _The geometry of the situation was not promising.

He - Sheldon Cooper, PhD - was object A. Amy Farrah Fowler (also, PhD) was object B. The cabin - 6.5 feet in length, 8 feet in height, 3.2 feet in width (probably no PhD) was space C. He visualized the problem from several angles and came up with a solution.

If Amy were to lean back on the bunk, he could step over her suitcase, balance on one foot while holding onto the top bunk. This would allow her enough room (with a degree of contortion, admittedly) to slide onto the floor in the space he was now occupying and climb up while maintaining proper sanitary conditions (to wit, no touching). He explained all this to Object B.

Less than ten seconds later, he was sprawled on the bottom bunk at an awkward diagonal, Amy's head was on his chest and her knee was wedged up against the far wall. One of his feet was in her suitcase and it was possible the other ankle had been rather badly sprained. The PhDs had turned out to be an irrelevant factor.

"I don't understand why it didn't work," Sheldon said.

"Balance, flexibility," Amy suggested. "The way you banged your head on the bunk and fell down when I accidentally brushed your leg with my foot." That had been a bit of a shock.

"So, your fault." He said. "And you _say_ it was an accident." The presence of her body sort-of, kind-of atop him was something of an issue as well. She's couldn't be called heavy, exactly, but it was incredibly difficult to ignore. The pain in his ankle was proving helpful in that regard.

Amy sat up, breaking all contact. "Sheldon, you know how there are times in our relationship when I want more physical affection?"

"Boy, do I!" he said. Sheldon liked knowing things, and he liked saying that he knew things even more, so it only occured to him after he'd said it that she might be leading him straight into a trap with that one.

"Well, you got me out of bed at three in the morning on a cold Canadian night so we could walk half-way across Vancouver, to catch a train that will take ten times more time and costs three times as much as flying."

"So really good value for money, hour per hour," he pointed out.

"...and you made me bruise my knee. In short, this is not one of the times when I particularly want to touch you!"

"I see. _Interesting_." Conditionals were always interesting. They presented such curious problems.

Amy shook her head and clambered up to the top bunk. "Good night, Sheldon!"

"Good night," he said.

He took off his shoes and stretched out again. All right, this was much better. He closed his eyes, ready to let the bewitching susurration of the beat of steel wheels going at 100 miles per hour (as mandated by Canadian regulations) on steel rails lull him into a perfect sleep.

"Sheldon?" His eyes snapped open. Amy was leaning down from the top bunk, her face upside down and hair almost in his face. "Would you hand me my nightgown? It's in the suitcase."

"Your what?" He sat up and nearly banged his head again.

"My nightgown," she said slowly. "In the suitcase."

"Oh. Of course." He peered into the open suitcase. It contained a few journals, a laptop, some neatly folded clothes and, clumped together in one corner, not so neatly at all, some frilly...things. Things he was not going to look at.

Nightgown. Right. He spotted a plaid red and blue fabric and hurriedly pulled it out and handed it up to her. It was rather saucy that he should know what her nightgown looked like without asking, now that he thought about it. He must be careful to make sure his mother never found out about this.

"Thanks," Amy said, and for a moment he thought that was the end of it.

The whole little structure of the two bunk beds shifted slightly and a cardigan dropped off the upper bed to land in the open suitcase.

Sheldon sat up. "What are you doing?"

"What?" her voice was muffled. "Just changing."

Another cardigan followed the first. Changing? Here? Now? _Into her nightgown? _That was two cardigans. What did that mean? If there were two cardigans in the suitcase, then what was she wearing now - right now! - all of a foot, at most, above his head? What did Amy wear under her cardigans? Talk about saucy, if he should know that!

It was a button-down shirt he learned a moment later, as it tumbled down to the suitcase. How he was starting to hate that suitcase.

"Amy! Stop it!"

"Stop what?" The bed shifted again. He could sense her contorting to remove some new, probably scandalous and definitely unimaginable item of clothing.

"Taking your clothes off!"

Amy snorted. "Calm down. You can't _see_ anything."

"I..."

"You what?"

_I'm _thinking_ about it._ "Nothing. It's just inappropriate, is what i'm saying. What would your mother think?"

There was a cold pause. 

"Just go to sleep, Sheldon. I'm not sleeping in my clothes, I don't care if it offends your delicate sensibilities. This box is uncomfortable enough as it is."

"Fine," he said, and added, "hrumph," for good measure. He screwed his eyes tightly shut and lay down stiffly.

Something dropped into the suitcase, and his traitorous eyes opened right up and looked. It seemed to be her skirt. Oh good lord. Amy was a foot away from him, separated by some flimsy plank, and she wasn't wearing a skirt.

Or - the suitcase's open maw was fed again - tights. One of the legs of the tights snaked across the floor, which made him think of ankles. At least it was done. Surely, surely that was it.

He closed his eyes - again! - but the tiny sound of a soft, light garment dropping onto the pile now overflowing the loathsome suitcase put an end to that. Not that he had been listening for it, not at all. He felt the bed shift again, _heard_ the whisper of fabric on skin as she finally pulled on the blasted nightgown, nd then felt her, finally, lie down.

"Good night, again," Amy said.

_I am asleep and I am not talking to her. Definitely asleep. _And definitely not wide awake, heart thudding, staring with panic at a clearly visible lacy white bra.


End file.
